


Inheritance

by RedheadAmongWolves



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Families of Choice, Harley survived the snap, Healing, Mourning, Parent Tony Stark, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Siblings, Tony Stark Feels, my heart still hurts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-09 13:58:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19477321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedheadAmongWolves/pseuds/RedheadAmongWolves
Summary: It isn't easy to miss someone.orPeter, Harley, and Nebula, after.





	Inheritance

**Author's Note:**

> Harley survived the snap, so imma say he’s like… 18? Peter is 16, Nebula… uh, is Nebula.
> 
> lol enjoy

They say goodbye to Nebula quietly, their little trio on the edge of the lake, the flowers and the arc reactor having drifted to just a speck in the distance. Morgan stayed for a brief moment, to give “the pretty blue lady” a hug, before Pepper and Happy called her back to the cabin. Which left the alien cyborg, the spider kid, and the mechanic’s protégé staring at each other, all a little lost, all a little bewildered.

“Did he just, like, collect us?” Harley asks.

It’s enough to make Peter startle into a laugh. Then realize it’s the first time he’s laughed since… since.

“Are we mad?” he replies.

Harley shakes his head. “Nah. Didn’t plan on showing up to this thing and getting two sisters and a brother, but hey. More the merrier.”

Nebula watches the exchange carefully. “I have only ever had one sister, and we hated each other for many years,” she says slowly.

Harley nods. “Sure. That’s kind of the territory with sisters though, isn’t it?” He raises his wrist, and his suit sleeve falls away to reveal a pink watch, in the shape of a flower, glittery and plastic like something from a Happy Meal. Peter arches an eyebrow. “My sister gave me this to wear today. I have to give it back when I get home, but still. Siblings annoy you until they don’t anymore.”

Peter suspects Nebula’s situation is a little different, but he just offers her a nod.

“I’m an only child,” he says. “It used to just be May and me. Now there’s--” he gestures to the group of black-clad superheroes behind them, making small talk or staring forlornly out at the lake.

“Yeah, but there was nobody like Tony, eh?” Harley huffs with a wry grin. “Patron saint of lost things.”

They all fall quiet again, staring down at their shoes, the water lapping softly at their soles.

May calls Peter’s name. She’d wanted to head out before rush hour hit the Holland Tunnel. They all look up at the sound, then back to each other.

“Don’t stay away long, yeah?” Harley says, bumping Nebula’s shoulder with his. She lifts her fists instinctively, but Harley doesn’t even blink. “We’ve got Morgan to look after, too. Can’t have her growing up without all of us bugging the shit out of her.”

Nebula lowers her arms to her sides again. “I will return.”

“And you,” Harley points at Peter, “give me your phone.”

Peter does, and Harley adds his name to the contacts, fires off a message to himself so Peter’s number is in his phone too. “There. Now we’re connected,” he gives a small, private smile, before he turns to Nebula. “I’d add you in too, but I can’t really afford collect calls to space.”

Nebula probably has no idea what this means, but she nods anyway.

“Goodbye,” she pauses, “brothers.”

Peter smiles at her, swipes at a stray tear that escapes the corner of his eye. “See you soon.”

And so Tony Stark’s legacy continues.

Peter’s been on the road home from the cabin for just two hours when he calls Harley.

“Sorry,” he says automatically, when Harley answers. But he can’t stop the way his breath hitches.

“Hey, man,” Harley says gently. “It’s okay.”

May darts a worried glance at Peter from the driver’s seat, so he burrows a little closer against the window, stares out at the trees.

“Tell you the truth,” Harley continues, “I was just about to call you. I keep thinking this is a nightmare that just won’t end.”

“Yeah,” Peter exhales shakily. “I wanted to tell you, though, that he, uh, he kept a picture of you, in his workshop. I saw it. It was a-- a news clipping, I think.”

Harley barks a startled laugh through the speaker. “Shit, really? Only time I got in the paper was when I won first place at my ninth grade science fair. What a sentimental dork.” Peter smiles too, because he’d seen the picture of himself in the cabin kitchen, next to the sink. “He told me about you, too, you know. Not the spider thing, of course, and you could tell it always made him really sad, so I never pushed him, but he’d mention you, almost without realizing. We’d be talking about astrophysics and he’d bring up an idea you’d had, or I’d be telling him about a movie I saw and he’d say something about a pop culture reference you made.”

The tears are sliding freely down Peter’s cheeks now, and he closes his eyes, slowly breathes in and out. He distantly hears a robotic voice on Harley’s end, and Harley sighs.

“That’s my plane boarding. Guess this really is real life.”

“Yeah,” Peter says. “I guess it is.”

After that, it’s weekly phone calls and skype sessions, but life, somehow, continues. Harley is finishing up his senior year and working at his town’s auto shop, Peter is doing homework and swinging around New York and adjusting to a world that lived five years without him, and Nebula is off doing space stuff with the Guardians.

It’s a few days before winter break when Ned and Peter amble into his apartment, May shouting after them about dinner as they toss their backpacks in Peter’s room.

Nebula is sitting on Peter’s windowsill, a knife spinning around in her fingers. Ned jumps a mile out of his skin, but Peter just smiles.

“Hey, Neb.”

The alien doesn’t look at him. “I do not know why I am here,” she says.

“It’s okay,” Peter says, dropping his backpack by his desk and moving over to sit on the bed. Ned politely ducks back into the hallway, calling to ask May if he can help her in the kitchen.

“How long are you back for?” Peter asks, when Nebula doesn’t say anything else.

The knife is a blur of silver in her hands. “Quill and the Asgardian were arguing about something called a pancake,” she says in answer. “They are at a building named Dennis to duel.”

“You mean Denny’s?” Peter grins. “We should go there, sometime, I think you’d like pancakes. Or maybe waffles. You strike me as a waffle person.”

“I am not made of,” she scowls, “ _waffles_.”

Peter just laughs, turns to gesture to the room. “You’re welcome to stay here for the night, we’ve got plenty of pillows, I could show you my new Nintendo Switch game if you promise not to snap it in half if you get frustrated--”

“We used to play ‘football’ with our fingers,” Nebula interrupts. Peter turns back to her, and her teeth shut with a click as she stares down at her hands, the knife hanging from her pinky, forgotten. “I asked Quill about football, and he showed me one before we left. It was not made of paper. _His_ was made of paper.”

Peter knows who they’re talking about now, of course, and he sidles a little closer across the mattress. Nebula’s inky eyes flick up to his, but he can’t read them.

“We spent a lot of time in the car on the drive to and from the compound,” Peter offers. “He could’ve flown in the suit, or even just sent me alone, but he took the car with me, and he’d listen to me talk about my classes, or my friends, or a new formula I found that made the webbing stretch just a little farther.”

“It’s okay to miss him,” he continues, repeating the words he’s told himself a thousand times since that day. Words he’s still trying to accept. “We have to be grateful for the time we had. Doesn’t make it hurt any less, of course,” he assents, “but it helps. It means you can still smile, even when you’re sad.”

Nebula furrows her brow, but says nothing else, and they sit in the quiet for a long moment, listening to the clatter of pots and pans as Ned probably catches something on fire in the kitchen, and then there’s May’s voice, placing an order for pizza.

“What is a… Nintendo Switch?” Nebula asks suddenly. Peter grins.

Harley gets into MIT, and Happy flies Peter to Tennessee that weekend to celebrate. One of Harley’s coworkers from the auto shop buys them a six pack and they trek out to a lake not far from Harley’s house, settle on a large rock and watch the sunset. Harley pops the top off a beer for an invisible third person, because he’s a sentimental dork too, even if he won’t admit it.

“Following in the great man’s footsteps,” Peter lifts his bottle in cheers. It tastes terrible, and it does nothing for him with his spidey mojo, and he’d also never known Tony to drink beer, but it’s the principle of the thing.

“To you joining me in a few years,” Harley replies, raising his own. They’d found out from Pepper a couple weeks after the funeral that Tony had left open spots for both of them at Stark Industries’ R&D, when and if they’d ever want them, among other assets. Peter likes the idea, but he’s keeping his options open. Harley, however, has never wanted anything more. Though it has to wait until after MIT, as per Tony’s instructions.

They clink bottles, and Peter takes one more sip before giving up and setting the bottle aside, lying back on the rock to look up at the sky. The stars are just starting to come out, particularly vivid in rural Tennessee.

“What’s space like?” Harley asks him.

Peter sucks in a breath. “Uh, big. Brighter than I thought it’d be. Mega freaky, but in a cool way, once you’re not fighting for your life.”

“I’d make a crack about me being the brains and you being the brawn, but unfortunately, you also got the brains,” Harley says. Peter laughs.

“You ever think about how completely random it was that he found us? Like, he crash landed in your backyard. He found me because I got bit by a weird radioactive bug. Like, what are the chances?” Peter asks. He tosses a bottle cap up in the air, catches it as it comes crashing back down to earth.

Harley hums. “Ridiculously slim. Impossible. But if Tony Stark could do one thing for damn certain, it was the impossible.” Peter throws the cap up in the air again, but this time Harley reaches out and snags it before he can. He spins it like a quarter on the surface of the rock.

They sit in silence for a moment, before Peter asks, “Do you think you’ll take up the armor?”

Harley, ever unfazed, doesn’t even shrug. “Maybe. Give me a couple years.”

“I used to wear a plastic Iron Man mask when I was a kid. Never thought any of this would happen.”

“You still are a kid.”

Peter chucks the bottle cap at him. Harley laughs.

The last rays of violet disappear behind the horizon. The air gets cooler, until Harley’s tugging his jacket closer around his shoulders, and even Peter’s teeth start to chatter. They should get back soon. Harley’s hitching a ride to New York with Peter in the morning, where they’ll meet with Pepper and Morgan, who want to take them out for a congratulatory brunch.

“I just want to make him proud,” Harley says softly.

Peter smiles. “He already is.” 

Father’s Day rolls around, and the first thing Peter does when he wakes up is dial Harley’s number. Harley picks up on the first ring.

“I was waiting,” he says in answer.

“How soon can you make it to New York?”

After that, Peter calls Fury, who grudgingly patches him through to Danvers, who delivers a message to Nebula. Nebula gets to New York about the same time Harley does, at like, three in the morning, and it technically isn’t Father’s Day anymore, not that Nebula even knows what that is, but they all still trek to the only Denny’s in Queens. They slide into a sticky booth and are presented with sticky menus from a wide-eyed waitress.

It turns out Nebula does in fact like waffles more than pancakes, though she keeps stealing bites of Harley’s crepes off his plate, and Harley laughs his ass off for reasons he won’t disclose when Peter orders an omelette, and that’s where they sit, for hours, until the dark world outside turns a pale blue, and Peter says it looks like the color of the arc reactor, for which he receives a spoonful of whipped cream flicked at his head.

Sometimes Peter is unspeakably sad, even when he thinks about how grateful he is to have these two nutcases in his life, because Tony isn’t there with them, isn’t there to see what he did not just for the world but for them, these kids from quite literally opposite corners of the galaxy, all lost things that he found and loved and brought together simply by being him.

It isn’t easy to miss people. But how lucky they are, to have a dad like Tony.

**Author's Note:**

> St. Anthony is the patron saint of lost things so here’s me crying
> 
> (don't own, don't profit, etc etc etc)


End file.
